Automation Anywhere, headquartered in San Jose, California, offers their robotic process automation (RPA) software.
$750
per month
Control-M
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Control-M from BMC is a platform for integrating, automating, and orchestrating application and data workflows in production across complex hybrid technology ecosystems. It provides deep operational capabilities, delivering speed, scale, security, and governance.
Automation Anywhere is well suited for automating repetitive or complex tasks that can be performed on a timeline such as data processing, data extraction, and file transfers. Automation Anywhere also has capabilities for integration with legacy applications and APIs to automate more complex data flows. Automation Anywhere is also ideal for automating document processing, form filling and other web activities since it has both image recognition and image-based automation capabilities.
On the other hand, Automation Anywhere is less appropriate for tasks requiring high levels of system intelligence such as machine learning or natural language processing as these require different types of technology. Additionally, if a task requires manual elements such as validations or reviews then Automation Anywhere may not be the most suitable solution either. It can be possible to set up automated validations but that might not always result in an ideal solution due to its limitations.
Control-M is a reliable and well-developed product with excellent vendor support that updates and expands the software often and offers a cloud-based deployment choice. When there are many Batch processes in IT operations that need to be monitored and controlled to ensure IT services, Control-M is ideally suited for centralized workload automation and task management.
Now I easily generate the invoices and quotation generation is an easy task now. Previously it was very time consuming as we have to drag the data from the excel sheets.
I will praise its integration with other software that has facilitated us to make amendments in the data across those platforms.
Control-M provides a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes in the organization. Nothing is hidden or left unattended in a timely manner.
The proper use of the BIM component has allowed the change of paradigm in the operation, adopting a proactive management instead of the typical reactive management in the event of production failures.
The use of Forecast and production simulations allows you to identify bottlenecks and focus first on managing those failures that have the greatest impact on production SLAs.
Control-M/Change Manager has arrived to shorten development cycles from requirements gathering to production testing. It has been a utility that monetizes the development of Jobs meshes.
The GUI is capable of efficiently handling more than 80,000 jobs per day. This is certainly a challenge in designing a good user experience. I don't know if there is a reasonable limit to this. One of my clients runs more than 80,000 Jobs daily and the GUI remains smooth all the time.
Job-As-Code is a DevOps accelerator that has just begun to be adopted. Its implementation will make workload management even more cost-effective.
Automation Anywhere doesn't come with easy installation, We need to install Java, IDEs and Databases in an orderly fashion which we are not able to do.
Automation Anywhere has no workflow design which is not making us to understand the process.
Automation Anywhere has no fit to size object cloning.
As with most of the mainframe software products, documentation seems to be the weak link for the products - written by people and for people who already know what they need to do, not for people who are trying to figure how to use the product.
We are a large JES3 mainframe shop. As with all vendors who still provide software for mainframe systems, software is generally designed and developed for JES2 and is frequently not fully tested in a JES3 environment before being shipped out.
It is a great product plain and simple. We've had Control-M for 20+ years and the support that BMC Software provides is really second to none. There is always a situation that someone can think of where I have to say, "No we can't do that", however I'm confident that we've been able to meet and most of the time exceed our end user expectations with what the product can offer them.
On more complex use cases, Automation Anywhere requires technical background like knowledge on network protocols and database language on task creation, and even people with technical background might have some trouble in the beginning because of the product particularities on how variable manipulation works, or how to get the object cloning (a more resilient screen manipulation command) to work as intended. The scheduling of tasks on the Control Room and the autologin feature isn't intuitive as they should, so much of this works requires documentation analysis to get it done on the first time.
Control-M's overall usability is very good because it is simple to use. Control-M SelfService is an easy tool to give to some of the users who want to use a web interface. The training curve for most users is very short and most of the functions are very simple to figure out.
Automation Anywhere is a great tool for a low cost, fairly easily scalable, and quickly learned. The company is growing by leaps and bounds and continually pushing the automation boundaries. The problem with fast expansion is that sometimes you can grow more quickly than you can appropriately support your products. While Automation Anywhere has an excellent support structure in place, every company and situation is different, and they often struggle with why problems arise in the system and how to fix them.
Although the product is very stable there have been a few incidents when I needed support. I have worked with technicians from all around the globe because of the rolling support. This gives me the quickest support when I need it most in those early hours of the morning. The technicians I have worked with have been very knowledgeable and if necessary got help when needed.
Automation anywhere scores well with respect to other solutions when we look at bot implementation, bot management, and basic automation. From a security perspective as well, AA fares well as compared to other solutions. UIpath is better suited when we operate using VPN systems and integrating with homegrown solutions.
We last reviewed the market in 2001 (schedulers are long-term commitments!) and Control-M edged (by a very narrow margin) the Tivoli alternative, with Dollar Universe (now part of Automic) back in third place. We also tested the Tidal Software scheduler (now part of Cisco) but I cannot see that listed here. Control-M won out through reliability and cross-platform support. Since we made our choice it has become clear that Control-M has moved ahead of the alternatives.
Highly reliable once you start experiencing the results. It helps you to have a clear cut results with better productivity numbers and financial savings
I would expect this product to give a positive return on investment. Running jobs in cron for example would require a lot more scripting effort to ensure that the proper notifications are done on failures. With the built in functionality in Control-M the effort would be greatly reduced
